Sri Lanka Telecom, the integrated telecommunication services provider with strength and resilience to weather turbulent market conditions, announced favourable results for its first quarter of the financial year ending 31st March 2009. The Group has achieved a net profit of Rs. 971 million during this quarter.
However, the achievement was 42% below the same quarter of the previous year, due to an increase in operational expenditure and depreciation. In spite of these adverse factors, combined with the economic downturn, the company still achieved a net profit of Rs.734 million, a 46% reduction on the same period last year.
During this quarter, the group revenue was Rs. 11,837 million, 2% higher than the first quarter of 2008. Thus, the company’s level of revenue had dropped by 11%, to Rs. 8,392 million.
“In spite of the adverse economic scenario and gloomy financial conditions prevailing worldwide, SLT has been able to show resilience to weather the storm and bring about performance,” Mrs. Leisha De Silva Chandresena, Chairperson of the SLT Group commented.
The company’s strategy of developing non-voice business sectors, which is also consistent with the government policy on ICT, continued with the development of Internet and data oriented services.
Due to various innovative strategies such as the introduction of affordable packages for customers, expansion of infrastructure facilities and augmenting improvements to the quality of service provided, SLT has become a trend setter and recorded the largest share in the Broadband and Data
Services markets. During the quarter, Broadband and Data revenue has grown by 25% to Rs.1, 595 million quarter on quarter.
Owing to prevailing economic conditions, Wired and CDMA subscribers have been compelled to scale down usage, while some customers have migrated to other fixed and mobile networks seeking budget price packages. As a result, these adverse conditions have brought down the Wired and CDMA revenue by 19% and 18% respectively. Various taxes and levies imposed on fixed services by the government have further aggravated this problem and put much pressure on customers to be more conscious about scaling down usage.
Pressure from the global recession has had an impact on international telecommunication traffic and pricing. These, combined with emerging competitors, have brought down international revenues by 15% to Rs. 1,980 million.
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